When life is reduced to the size of a small screenNine years ago at the Cairo Suhba we said, “The Internet is death.” The repeated use of purposeless websites bends the fitra out of shape. For some people, their fitra bends so much it becomes irreversible. It’s just not possible to straighten them out. It was many years ago that Sheikh Yunus remarked to me about the dunya, “When it dominates, it takes captive.” We might say the same about the Internet. It too takes the human heart, spirit, and b

About Time




The Twenty-First Century Stress Syndrome
James L. Wilson
Hypoadrenia is a range of debilitating symptoms that are only too familiar to many people. It is known by many names including neurasthenia, adrenal apathy, subclinical hypoadrenia, and adrenal fatigue. The condition has been recognized, written about, and treated for over a hundred years, but is now generally not taught in medical schools, becoming a problem invisible to modern medicine. In contrast, fifty years ago it was more likely 

Adrenal Function




Oliver James
Over the past several years British psychologist Oliver James has observed a virus he has termed affluenza spread through the English-speaking world. Affluenza is no ordinary illness. It targets the mind and destroys one’s emotional well-being. It can destroy friendships and marriages, leave one lonely and exhausted, and ruin childhoods. It makes for selfish, vindictive people, who are prone to depression and anxiety, which in extreme cases leads to hospitalization. And it trigge

Affluenza




A New Way of Life
David Servan-Schreiber (d. 2011)
David Servan-Schreiber sensed something wasn’t quite right a year after his thirtieth birthday. A professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, he felt his brain didn’t work. Eventually he was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor. This type of cancer is rare with a poor prognosis. People often survive less than a year, even after aggressive treatment. Being a medic he asked what he could do to fight the disease. Th

Anticancer

The emerging pandemic of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes in the Indian subcontinentBiryani used to be food of nawabs and Sultans. It was the food of occasional festivals. It was never the food of everyday life. Some 12,000 years ago India was very different. The subcontinent was transitioning from a hunter-gather society to an agrarian, neolithic culture. Many parts of the country that are now desert were thriving agricultural areas where barley and eventually wheat were grown. These grains

Biryani and Blubber




A boy sits hunched over his computer playing a video game. His reactions are fast and his motivation high. His brain is working overtime, and he sits still for hours on end. He does not appear to have an attention deficit disorder, as his concentration is total. However, since kindergarten he has been on drugs such as Adderall, Ritalin, and Concerta. He has a friend across town who is equally intelligent and has not been medicated, but his parents and teachers are not happy. Even the girls in

Boys Adrift




Preliminaries
Some forty years ago a theory that a growing tumor could be “starved to death” by cutting off its blood supply was presented in the New England Journal of Medicine. It was met with skepticism, ridicule, and dismissal. This theory was called anti-angiogenesis. Today there are twelve anti-angiogenic drugs on the market for cancer treatment, with twenty-six more in the final stages of human testing, and another hundred-plus in human trials. Every major pharmaceutical company has an

Cancer and Angiogenesis




How the Antivaccine Movement Threatens Us All
Paul A. Offit
Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Professor of Vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania. Founding member of the Autism Science Foundation. More than 140 peer-reviewed papers on vaccination.
Death, blindness, paralysis, and stunted growth were ever present in childhood until the latter half of the twentieth century. Let us begin by simply noting the number of children affected by

Deadly Choices

 In 1980 a group of patients were admitted into the prestigious Mayo Clinic in the United States. They reported vague symptoms of fatigue and pain under their right rib. Upon testing, doctors found inflammation in their liver. They found scarring in and around the liver. There was inflammation that stopped the liver working properly. There was severe liver damage, and there was a build-up of fat in the liver. This was the first time doctors had seen a damaged, fatty liver in people that was not 

Death by Falooda




The Truth about Cell Phone Radiation, What the Industry Is Doing to Hide It, and What You Can Do to Protect Your Family
Devra Davis
At the height of the Cold War sailors would stand next to radar installations on newly commissioned naval ships in order to make themselves infertile. In 1956 one of England’s leading epidemiologists found that X-rays of pregnant women increased the risk of childhood cancer. She was pilloried—then the findings were confirmed some thirty years later. After World W

Disconnect




Breaking Free from the World of Excess
John Naish
Getting richer is no longer making us happier—if it ever did. Depression, self-harm, and suicide are on the rise. Families are splitting up. Children are increasingly pressured and some desperately unhappy. Success and happiness are now conditioned by job status, by the cars we drive, the brands we wear and consume, the loyalty cards we are admitted into, the airlines we travel on, or the neighborhood we live in. Success is determined by our s

Enough

Reviewing the Impacts of the Western Diet upon ImmunityIan A. MylesNutritional Journal 2014Mothers influence their child’s dietary preferences while their baby is still in their womb. The food that she enjoys during her pregnancy will shape whether her child eats his vegetables or gorges on high-sugar junk food. From the womb until the age of two, the child inherits his microbiota from his mother. The microbiota is huge amounts of bacteria and flora, that vastly outnumber human cells, and which 

Fast Food Fever

 Overcoming addiction – whether to smartphones, messaging, video watching, Internet surfing, gaming, pornography, drugs, or any of the world’s allurements – is to overcome the nafs. And the first thing the salik knows about the nafs is that it is easily fooled. For the spirit to rise, we use the intellect to rein in the ego.Never before in history have anonymity, convenience, and immorality come together so seamlessly as they do now. What was once only possible with effort and planning is now re

Getting Back Home




The Surprising Truth about Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar—Your Brain’s Silent Killers
David Perlmutter
Remember that hot slice of toast dripping in butter you ate for breakfast? Perhaps it had Vegemite on. That bagel, that croissant, or those cereals you wolfed down. Think of the fragrance of coffee and freshly baked bread that you inhaled—two wonderful, wonderful aromas. Remember the anticipation, the delight, the contentment you experienced? Or the euphoric pleasure from eating a doughnut. This pl

Grain Brain

 Not far from the Red Sea town of Marsa Alam, the road turns left toward the maqam of Imam Abul Hasan al-Shadhili. For the next seventy miles, there are a handful of cars, and the only inhabitants are a few Nubian families, housed in small shacks dotted by the roadside. The landscape is sparse. There’s just a few scrubs, while in the distance mountains rise up. The road is good, and after an hour the maqam is visible. The town used to be nonexistent. Now, there are two thousand people living the

Indian Silence

 It is a February evening in London and not yet late. A dense fog lies across the street, punctuated by a single lamp. Five friends climb into a black cab. One of the party leans back in his seat, staring transfixed at the rear window with a vacant eye. He reports that a giant Star of David is following the cab as it progresses down the street. His mouth moves up and down as if he were a goat.An hour passes, the party of friends become calm as they wind their way home. Their transport beckons an

Paantasia




Pamela Paul
Pornography has become an epidemic. At least 66% of men aged eighteen to thirty-four indulge in porn; 41% of women have intentionally watched it online; 90% of teenagers who are regular internet users have viewed it; and prepubescents are being treated for pornography addiction. There are now over one-quarter of one billion pornographic websites in existence. We spend more on porn than on football, baseball, and basketball combined. $14 billion a year is spent in California alone.

Pornified




The Epidemic of Heart Disease in the Indian Subcontinent
The rich and noble history of Hyderabad has led the Indian government to recognize the city as one of the most important heritage sites in all India. Since medieval times the banquets and food of the Deccan have been legendary—perhaps second only to Lahore. Recently, however, Hyderabad has gained a new title: the diabetes capital of the world, with more diabetics as a percentage of population than anywhere. One in every six people above

Reviving the Heart of Hyderabad




The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain
John J. Ratey
Despite Hollywood’s protestations to the contrary the American way of life, and all those who follow it, seem to be failing. The obesity rate stands at 65% and is spiraling out of control. Over 10% of the population now has Type 2 diabetes, a fully preventable disease, which is implicated in further health problems such as heart disease. The leading cause of disability in the United States and Canada is depression, ahead of

Spark

The Prophet, Allah bless him and give him peace, said, “The strong believer is better and more beloved to Allah than the weak believer, though there is good in both.” Strength carries many meanings. It can mean strength of character or having a strong faith. The twelfth-century Andalusian Imam Qadi Iyad writes that “strong believer” also refers to physical strength. It is physical strength that we want to say a few words on, to encourage all of you, men and women, and especially teenagers, to st

Strength in Our Time

Robert DarntonProfessor of History at Harvard University and Director of Harvard University LibraryNothing presents text better than ink embedded in paper. When ink is fixed onto paper by a skilled typesetter, then bound by a deft bookbinder using fine leather, there is no better way of reading words than from a book.A book can be thumbed for quick access to facts and knowledge. It does not need to be plugged in, booted up, or upgraded. It will not break down nor need repairing. It does not requ

The Case for Books

 A few weeks ago, I visited the house of a family I had known for some time. Their father had passed on at the age of one hundred, and I went to pay my respects. One person there reminded me of the time they had helped me to get a bed, some decades ago. Those were simpler times in Jordan. The neighborhood was still on the outskirts of Amman. It was undeveloped, shorn of the apartment blocks that now crowd out the sun. Goats roamed freely among the olive groves. The invasion of American goods and

The Chattering Classes

 Over the last thirty years there has been an alarming transfer of power from parent to child. In North American culture, and those areas of the world infected by this culture, the antics and opinions of the famous and infamous, singers and actors, and same-age social peers matter more than parents and teachers. In place of the family unit is the teenage social circle linked neatly together by an always on social media that promotes the cult of the new, the irrelevant, the immature, and celebrit

The Collapse of Parenting




The Real Science Behind What We Eat
Tim Spector
Wu is an eighteen-year-old boy from China. He weighs 175 kg and has a BMI of 59. Unsurprisingly he has a whole host of medical problems, most of them caused by inflammation. His weight was not due to excessive calories. His food was the standard fare for Chinese teenagers of meat and noodles, and while he was eating slightly more than he should, it was not enough to make him 100 kg overweight. Wu was fortunate to find the clinic of Professor Zha

The Diet Myth




Exploding the Antidepressant Myth
Irving Kirsch
Irving Kirsch is a clinical psychologist and Associate Director at Harvard Medical School. He is an internationally respected clinician and researcher who holds professorships at the University of Connecticut and at Hull University. His work is published in some of the most respected medical journals. And his findings have influenced regulatory bodies to change their prescribing guidelines for depression. Throughout his clinical practice he has 